Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Paramount+, A24
There’s a peculiar feedback loop humming around To Catch a Predator right now. The latest trailer for Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s A24 film about Chris Hansen, dropped last week and looks absolutely bananas: Robert Pattinson (adding to his freaky repertoire of incredible voices) appears to play Hansen as pure megalomaniac, drunk on the success of his Dateline NBC segment to a point where he is seemingly imbued with a strange, almost divine sense of purpose. What’s wild about this treatment is not only that the real-life Hansen is just very much still with us but that he continues to do his thing of stinging child predators and riding the robust digital true-crime wave.
For the uninitiated, To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to ’08, involved producers posing as minors online, using decoy actors to lure men to staged houses, then filming Hansen confronting them (“You see how this looks, right?”) alongside local police. It became a cultural phenomenon, and its primal appeal — watching a suspected predator’s life virtually end onscreen as entertainment — has proved remarkably durable. Online, the show has become an odd culture tentpole: a source of memes, multiple generations of fandom, archival obsession, and copycat vigilante operations.
Primetime will mark the second revisit of the phenomenon in recent years. David Osit’s documentary Predators, which premiered at Sundance in 2025 before landing on Paramount+ to strong reviews, covered the same subject with a quieter approach, probing Hansen’s methods, the ethics of watching, the sting operation that ultimately led to the segment’s cancellation, and its long afterlife online. Osit is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse himself who makes his own conflicted response to consuming To Catch a Predator part of the story. The documentary ended up proving divisive; Osit says that after its release, he started getting messages accusing him of defending pedophiles, a reaction that only sharpened his interest in empathy itself being something audiences distrust when directed at people judged to be irredeemable.
And now there’s Primetime, tagged as “Inspired by True Events.” Oppenheim, himself a documentarian (Spermworld, Ren Faire) is making his first leap into narrative filmmaking, transforming the same source material into fiction. With such a different take on the subject set to enter the world, Osit discussed how he feels about the prospect of Primetime, the enduring fascination with To Catch a Predator, and the aftermath of Predators.
Have you seen the trailer for Primetime?
I don’t think so. I have seen the film, though.
Oh, you have! Did Oppenheim reach out to you as part of research?
I can’t give context as to how they reached out to me, but I know Lance and a few members of the team, and what I can say on the record is that they asked me to watch a cut before they finished it.
Acknowledging that I’m putting you in a sensitive position here, what thoughts can you share at this point about what you saw?
Well, just as a documentary filmmaker, it’s wild to make a nonfiction project over a couple of years and then see a lot of that story transformed into a fictional world. I’d never had that experience before. It was probably one of the most interesting professional experiences of my life, sitting and watching that film. I probably can’t say much more than that, but I’ll say it was fascinating to watch.
That kind of loops into one of the ideas in Predators, which is the tension in packaging what’s positioned as news or documentary as a pure entertainment commodity. I imagine watching Primetime, then, can only be quite the trip.
I’ve never questioned more than I did while making Predators why we watch what we watch, and what we’re supposed to glean from it or not. That became front of mind during the process. The resulting film is very much about the audience, about filmmaking, about the act of documentation. And it’s kind of gauche to do that in a fiction film, you know? Abbas Kiarostami did that in Taste of Cherry, which befuddled certain audiences but then also won the Palme d’Or in 1997. That’s sort of my experience with Predators. The film premiered at Sundance, got a lot of wonderful attention, then dropped on Paramount+ two weeks after the Epstein Files Transparency Act. After that, I’d get an email a day telling me I should kill myself, that I was a predator, that someone should check my hard drive.
So much of the film, for me and my peers, is an examination of the media — how we tell stories, how we become part of stories, or don’t. That’s why I gradually became a character in it. There’s a lot going on, and I think there’s a level of media literacy that doesn’t extend to people watching just the next true-crime doc on their Paramount+ feed.
Tell me about those emails.
The vast majority of the frustration — and I’m paraphrasing here — was with the idea that I was asking people to empathize with pedophiles. That stunned me, because that’s not what I feel I was doing, and it’s still not the point. You might find yourself, watching Predators, feeling empathy for people who’ve done bad things. But no one’s ever convinced me that empathy is in itself bad. It doesn’t mean we don’t punish bad behavior or try to stop it. It means we can understand where it comes from or be frustrated that, in the case of child predation, predators are often themselves victims of child molestation or predation when they were younger. It’s this awful cycle. That people would get upset over the idea that they felt any emotion, or that I was asking them to feel any emotion, I found staggering.
I’ll say what I’ve said in every interview since Predators came out, because it’s still true: Nothing is more evil than child predation as far as we’re concerned as a society. It’s a pretty binary thing to us. That often means we don’t interrogate why it happens, how it happens, the different types of crime involved. What To Catch a Predator did was lump all those criminals into something we could enjoy and commodify. What we enjoyed wasn’t the commission of the crime; it was the punishment of the potential criminal. That’s really what I found worth critiquing. I could not have imagined that some people’s takeaway would be that the film is pro-pedophile, which I’ve seen people call it. It speaks to how empathy is seen as weakness in our society. It’s actually a strength. I think I’m stronger than someone who refuses to empathize with a person who’s done wrong.
I hadn’t realized before watching Predators that there’s a whole ecosystem of copycats, but given the lucrative true-crime economy, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
It makes sense, right? Twenty years ago, before To Catch a Predator aired, people couldn’t become their own content creators. The technology didn’t exist and neither did the drive. There was Xanga; there was MySpace; YouTube had just begun. “Me at the Zoo,” the first YouTube video, came out just a few months after the first episode of To Catch a Predator aired. This was before the Arab Spring, before people realized the power and reach of social media. But it also took place in an era when we were all still fluent on the internet. We forget there was a brief period when the internet was already huge and everywhere, everyone had it — it just wasn’t social yet. So it only makes sense that now that everyone can be their own content creator, enterprising individuals would re-create the shows of their youth.
And it’s an easy formula to re-create. To Catch a Predator doesn’t take much work. The only real issue was legal, which the original show got around by claiming newsworthiness; they didn’t have to blur faces. As for lawsuits, very few people wanted to spend their own money on an attorney and draw more attention to their case and to their name being public as a potential predator, so a lot of people didn’t even contest what happened to them on the show. We see potential child predators as subhuman, and we don’t much care what happens to them. It feeds a societal urge we all feel: We want our communities to be safe. That’s why you can show ten people my film, and five will say the copycats are heroes, and five will say they’re evil. And the thing is, no one’s right.
When you started developing Predators, what was animating you?
I’d been fascinated by To Catch a Predator for years, but I never thought, I want to make a movie about this. Then I went online and discovered the fandom community for the show, which was not only still devoted to it more than 20 years later but had spent those two decades filing FOIA requests, compiling raw footage, collecting decoy calls and interrogation footage. Watching that raw footage was a huge hook for me. It gave the material a complexity that felt completely different from watching the show.
I’d read a chat log and think, This man’s a monster. Then I’d watch his raw footage and feel for him. Then I’d read the log again and find him monstrous again. I kept going back and forth. I thought, What if I could give that experience to an audience — the same one I was having as a new father at the time? What if I could build a film with that discomfort as its spine, where you’re never sure where you stand on something that otherwise feels settled? Then, as I looked further, I realized Chris Hansen was still doing his thing and that there were all these copycats. It seemed like there was a whole story here — not just as a history of To Catch a Predator but how it was the beginning, in many ways, of an entire media movement. It birthed true-crime television in a certain way, and it was one of the first times journalism and law enforcement worked together to create entertainment. Cops doesn’t count. There’s no story in Cops. To Catch a Predator was pitched as journalism. It aired on a news program; it wasn’t its own show. What’s the line in the trailer? “We’re going to be bigger … ?”
“We’re going to be bigger than Lost.”
Yeah, something like that. This was Dateline NBC. The fact that it was wrapped in the trappings of journalism makes it much clearer how we got into the mess we’re in now with modern journalism.
You also turned inward, drawing from your own history as a survivor.
I felt almost a burden to include an umbrella story in this film. I’m asking people to go back and forth and sit with complicated feelings. But when you do that in a film, the question becomes, Does the director have complicated feelings too? Directors are so often anonymous. They don’t exist within the documentary, or they do as the voice of God narrating the whole thing. Very rarely is the director something in between. I thought, What would happen if that became part of the story too? How would it change what you’re watching if you understood something about why the film was being made?
So you considered not inserting yourself at some point.
I certainly didn’t want to.
How has your relationship with Predators and the material changed since its premiere?
If I had the mental or emotional bandwidth, I would revisit this in some way and try to create some project where I could parse where different members of different audiences decide that the film has gone too far for them, or lost them, or become, in their words, sympathetic to pedophiles, or too pro-pedophile, or something. It’s fascinating to read Letterboxd. I’ll see comments sitting right next to each other: someone calling the last 15 minutes of the film some of the most incredible they’ve seen, someone else calling those same 15 minutes some of the worst.
I won’t lie, though — I’m disappointed when people land on such a simple, wrong conclusion that the film just wants you to feel bad for predators. It’s such an unfortunate reading of the film, but it makes sense. These people may be faced with something that they’ve never been faced with before, which is the idea that a human being is not necessarily as bad as the worst thing they’ve ever done or thought. Or with the idea that we live in a society, top to bottom, where expressing empathy is treated as weakness. That’s built into our political culture right now, and the film is asking for an alternative. For me, as a survivor or whatever you want to call it of some of the worst things that can happen to a child, it’s stronger to stay curious than to shut out the world and want to burn down the structures that hurt me instead of interrogating them. I’m proud of that.
What do you make of To Catch a Predator becoming a kind of meme online?
I think the show made people laugh in an uncomfortable way when it first aired. People hadn’t seen anything like it before. The persona Chris Hansen adopts on the show — my film gets into this, and I’m positive Primetime addresses it too — is funny, and bleak, but also safe. And memes are kind of the provenance of privilege. You get to enjoy anonymity when you’re making one.
Were you surprised Chris Hansen had you on his podcast? After all, Predators was essentially a critique of his whole thing.
Have you ever heard the expression “All press is good press”? I haven’t discussed it directly with Chris, but I’d imagine he’s a subscriber to that mentality.
Do you wish he were a little more introspective about all this?
I wish all of us were more introspective about everything.
That’s fair. Let’s circle back to Primetime. I’m intrigued that Lance Oppenheim, who was a documentarian up to this point, made this leap into narrative filmmaking. Are you interested in doing the same?
I would love to, but I have some hangups to get over first. I have convinced myself that I like working with reality and doing things within what’s real. I also don’t know if I want to work with actors; I’ve heard that’s a prerequisite to most fiction projects. I’ve always had an idea to do a serious body-swap movie — like Freaky Friday but it’s a proper Dardenne-brothers-style drama with no one laughing. A social drama that just happens to include a body swap — that’s my dream film.
Last question: You’ve said you’ve seen the film. What did you think of Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen voice?
Well, he’s a talented actor.
